


London Calling

by crumbsfiction



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: 80's, Alternate Universe - Punk, F/M, some violence, there are mentions of a transmisogynist slur in here heads up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1264453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crumbsfiction/pseuds/crumbsfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s technically New Year’s Day when he’s grabbed by the collar and kissed square on the lips, but it still feels like 1979.</p>
            </blockquote>





	London Calling

It’s technically New Year’s Day when he’s grabbed by the collar and kissed square on the lips, but it still feels like 1979. The club is seedy, the air filled with cigarette smoke and the floor sticky with spilled beer. The guests are all getting progressively drunker as the clock ticks idly towards the first morning of the new year.

The place, located in a small alleyway in the outskirts of Camden, is strict with its no-tolerance policy regarding drugs, which Levi is grateful for, but not so strict with checking ID’s, which is even better. The girl who grabbed him is a brunette, sporting an asymmetrical sidecut with teased bangs falling over the left lens of her oval glasses. She’s older than him, he guesses, a couple years maybe, and drunk out of her mind.

“Happy New Year!” she shouts and then she’s gone, disappeared back into the crowd and into the arms of a friend with close-cropped platinum hair and a septum piercing.

It’s the end of a decade, the end of his first month in London and the end of the night, so Levi turns to go get Erwin.

He finds him leaning against the brick wall just outside the doors, a thin clove cigarette hanging from his lips. He blows the smoke in Levi’s face as he approaches.

“We should go before the fighting starts to get ugly,” Levi says and Erwin nods in agreement, holding out his pack of cigarettes. Levi pulls one out and lights it with his own lighter, taking a long drag as they head together towards the underground station.

“It’s going to be a good year,” Erwin tells him and Levi glances up at his friend’s face.

“Why’d you say that?”

Erwin shrugs. “Just a feeling. A new start is what we need, after all, and what could possibly be a fresher start than a new decade?”

Levi is both too tired and too drunk to discuss politics or philosophy so he just hums in agreement as they make their way down the stairs to the trains.

He hopes Erwin’s right.

-

It’s March, and they’re in a run down basement south of the Thames. Speakers, cheap but loud, are piled up against the walls, connected to the instruments of the band playing. The music is full of raw anger and attitude, just the way Levi likes it, and Mike, one of Erwin’s friends, is admittedly doing a fantastic job with the bass. 

The drummer looks oddly familiar, but he can’t put his finger on where he might have seen her before. 

Before he can pursue his train of thought, someone bumps into him from behind and some of the beer in his bottle sloshes over the edge and onto his boots. Levi turns around with a sharp glare.

“What the fuck-“

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl says with a genuinely apologetic grin and Levi stops.

“Do I know you?” He asks, squinting through the dim lighting, and then it hits him. New Year’s Eve, the girl with the glasses and teased bangs at three AM, “You kissed me.”

“No, I just bumped into you,” she laughs and takes a swing of her own drink.

“Not now,” Levi says, “In Camden. New Year’s. You were pretty fucked up.”

“Oh,” She says and nods. “I believe you. I was throwing up for a day and a half afterwards. Worth it though.”

“In that case you’re a pretty terrible drinker,” Levi tells her and she laughs again.

“I am. That’s why I don’t do it a lot. Got to keep up with the punk agenda and all that though.”

“Doing what everyone else is doing isn’t very punk,” he deadpans and she snorts.

“What’s your name?” She asks and he tells her. “I’m Hanji,” she says, extending a hand, which he takes. “You know the band?”

“Sort of. Bassist’s a friend of a friend. You?"

Hanji nods. “The drummer, Nanaba, she’s my best friend.”

“She’s good,” Levi tells her, and he means it.

“I’ll tell her.”

They’re both quiet for a while. Levi lets the thumping, bassy rhythm wash over him and feels it vibrate deep in his chest. The band is playing a cover of _Hong Kong Garden_ , a few people shouting along with the lyrics and a couple dancing in jerky, intoxicated motions. He sees Erwin across the room, mouth moving along and Mohawk bobbing. He doesn’t always style his hair up, but when he does, the result is always damn good looking.

Levi turns back to Hanji, who’s watching the band intently. Her bangs are even more tousled that they were on that night in Camden and he wonders if she ever brushes it out.

“I like your shirt,” he tells her, because he does, and she glances down as if she’s forgotten what she’s wearing. It a Sex Pistols shirt, washed out and worn, the sleeves fraying slightly from use. Hanji smiles.

”Thanks. My old girlfriend gave it to me,” she says. “You like the Pistols?" 

Levi shrugs. “Bit to mainstream for me,” he tells her, honestly, and she frowns.

“You a Siouxie kind of guy?” She asks, gesturing to the band, who’re on the last chorus of the song.

“Sure. I’m pretty open. Misfits, Black Flag, Joy Division-“ she cuts him off.

“Joy Division are fucking mainstream.”

“They’re not,” he says defensively and sticks his chin out, which makes her smile.

“I didn’t say that they’re bad. But they’re mainstream. If you can trash talk my Pistols, I can call Joy god damn Division mainstream.”

“Whatever,” he says, flippantly.

They’re both quiet for a beat, as is the band. The singer asks for requests for a last song and someone shouts out _New Values_ , which makes Levi roll his eyes.

”You passed the test, by the way.”

”What test?” He asks, cocking a thin brow.

”Usually when I mention a female ex, people just ask if I’ve had a teenage lesbian phase or whatever. I’m bi, you know. I don’t understand how sexual identities can be so fucking hard to grasp, but. You didn’t. I like that.”

Levi shrugs. ”People are fucking idiots.”

“Agreed.”

He feels gross and sweaty in his thin t-shirt and leather jacket, but the Iggy Pop song is thankfully short, despite the inane wolf howling halfway through. The basement clears out pretty quickly after that.

Levi turns to cross the room and find Erwin when Hanji catches him by the wrist. 

“Hey,” she says. “They’re having another gig here in two weeks, if you want to come. Bring your friend,” she says, nodding towards Erwin, who’s making his way in their direction.

Levi flips his black bangs out of his eyes and feigns disinterest. “Maybe,” he says.

Hanji just grins. “See you then.”

-

He does go, of course, him and Erwin both do. Levi wears his Joy Division t-shirt just to piss Hanji off and she laughs and drags him onto the impromptu dance floor to jam out to a cover of _English Civil War_.

-

When Levi moved to London he lucked out on many accounts, one of them being his housing. Erwin’s apartment is too small for two, even though his friend offered a spot on his couch time and time again. Instead, he’d found a small room in a house in the northern parts of Camden. His landlady, an old woman with full sleeves of sailor tattoos and a girlfriend who came to visit almost every day, gave him a shamefully low price, granted that he occasionally helped her with heavy lifting or putting away the groceries.

“Well, you won’t be much help with taking down things from high shelves,” she’d told him when they’d first met, eyeing him up and down, and he’d cracked a smile. They got along well.

He spends his days working part time in a gross and run down café for minimum wage and the rest drifting around the endlessly fascinating city, beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Erwin is with him for the most part, or Erwin and Mike together, pointing out the landmarks and the clubs with the nastiest bouncers and the restaurants where the Indian food is practically free. Nanaba, the girl with the short hair and septum piercing, joins them after a while, hand shyly interlocked with Mike’s. Not long after that Hanji starts following them around as well.

They form a haywire quintet of sorts, the five of them. 

They’re present at almost every rally and protest there is, against capitalism and nuclear weapons and racism alike. Levi loves the rush of adrenaline surging through his body as they finally get to raise their voices for their causes, the ones he’s been silently fighting towards for so long, the ones Erwin told him all about when he was younger, the ones that have worked their way into his head and mind in so many ways through the years. 

He somehow loves it even more when they’re sprinting down narrow alleyways together, police on their heels and dogs barking somewhere behind them, loves the thrill of it, the feeling of blood pumping through his veins.

“I feel alive,” Hanji tells him between gasping breaths, hands on her knees. They’re alone now, split up from Erwin, Mike and Nanaba to make sure that at least one of them wouldn’t end up in jail.

“Me too,” Levi breathes, and they break down in laughter, echoing between the dark bricks of the alley walls.

-

 _Love Will Tear Us Apart_ comes out in April and Levi puts some of his meagre spare money on the single, plays it on endless repeat on his beat up record player.

-

Hanji’s apartment is bigger than Erwin’s, but not by a lot. It’s mostly one big room with brick walls and a tiny kitchen connected to it. The word ANARCHY is spray-painted in red capital letters across one of the walls.

“I didn’t do that,” she tells him and hands him a bowl of noodles. “I don’t know who did, actually. But when I find out, they’re going to pay my rent for the rest of my life.”

Hanji studies politics at the university, which Levi finds genuinely impressive. He doesn’t tell her though. Instead, he sits and lets her talk. She tells him about her radical opinions, about Star Trek and bands and movies he’s never heard of. He won’t remember the names of them later, just watches the enthusiasm on her face and he expressions she pulls when she speaks of her bigoted classmates and people who are rude to waiters. 

“Sorry,” she says after a while, when their bowls are empty and the sky outside has warped from dusky to pitch black, “I always get carried away when I’m talking.” She’s got an expression on that’s almost bashful.

“I don’t mind,” he tells her and presses down the warm feeling in his chest. “You’ve got some interesting stuff to say, so.”

“You want to go out for a bit?” She asks and grabs his bowl and fork, brings it back into the kitchen.

Levi shrugs. “Sure.”

They take the underground to Piccadilly station and then the stairs up to ground level. The air is warm, a bit humid, and the square is almost void of people.

Hanji grabs him by the sleeve. “Come on,” she says, and then she’s scaling the Shaftesbury Memorial, pulling herself up onto the monument with her hands and kicking off with her booted feet. Levi follows suit, gripping the cold metal and climbing. It isn’t far up, a few metres at most, and they sit down on the monument together, thigh to thigh.

“My ass is cold as fuck,” Levi tells her after a moment of silence and Hanji laughs out loud, folding over forwards. A few of the passer-byes, tourists for the most part, shoot them odd glances as they sit on top of one of London’s most well known and respected landmarks. Hanji gives them the finger. 

Levi, smiling slightly, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offers Hanji one, and she pulls one out from the bunch. Grabbing her own lighter from her back pocket, she lights up both hers and Levi’s cigarettes. They sit in comfortable silence after that, blowing smoke into the night air and watching the activity around them dwindle down to almost nothing.

Hanji points a finger upwards, to the small statue over their heads. “Eros is the Greek God of love,” she tells Levi and he nods.

“I did go to school, you know.”

“Shush,” she says. “I’m being clever.”

“You always are.”

“ _Shush_ ,” she repeats and Levi does shut up. “According to mythology, the world was once just a mass of stone, and Eros, or love, was the only thing that existed. All around the world, there was nothing but love.”

“There was no life, though,” Levi says, and she nods.

“We ruined it. We ruined love. It doesn’t exist in that way, anymore.” She sighs.

Levi glances up at the statue. The empty-eyed God is pointing his bow forwards, arrow just fired. Levi has a pretty good guess where it’s landed.

“I’m not sure,” he says and glances over at Hanji. “Maybe there’s still some of it out there.”

She sighs and takes another drag of her cigarette. “Maybe. Who knows?”

They’re silent after that again, just sit together for what must be hours as the light begins its return to the sky. It blossoms in an explosion of pink and orange and Hanji whistles.

“We should get going,” she says. “Before the cops turn up and chase us away.” Levi just nods in agreement. Climbing down is harder, legs asleep from sitting down for too long, but they make it down and back into the underground.

They take different trains home, and Hanji squeezes his hand before she turns to leave.

-

Levi breaks two of his knuckles in August.

They’re in the middle of Kensington, him, Hanji and Nanaba, and it’s definitely unfamiliar territory. Hanji dragged them here to visit a new record store she’d read about, and so there they are, three kids decked out in full punk fashion, wandering through one of the nicest districts of the city.

People turn to stare and point, of course, but none of them really care. It’s not important. Hanji is talking loudly and making big hand gestures, describing the albums she’s saved up to buy and Nanaba contributing with her own list of recommendations.

They find the shop fairly easily. It’s small, wedged between a tattoo parlour and a Chinese restaurant, but it has every band Levi’s ever listened to and more. Hanji makes a small stack of her new vinyl, a mix of The Clash, Ramones and everything in between.

Levi digs out a bill from his inner pocket and plucks the new Joy Division album, _Closer_ , from the shelf. They pay for their new possessions to a pierced cashier who compliments the three of them on their hairstyles.

They exit the store together, and Levi clutches the record to his chest. Hanji notices, smiles, and punches him lightly on the shoulder.

“Mainstream,” she sniggers, and Levi surprises himself with blowing a raspberry at her, making Nanaba laugh.

They round a corner, making it back towards the underground station when someone calls out behind them.

“Hey, tranny!”

Nanaba freezes in place at the same time as Hanji whips around at breakneck speed.

“Excuse me?” She says, glaring. There’s a group of four walking towards them, guys around the same age as them, tall and bulky.

“You heard me,” says one of them, who Levi presumes to be the leader, nodding towards Nanaba. “He’s a tranny, isn’t he? She-male scum-" 

Levi swings his fist before he’s actually had the time to react. His hand connects with the leader’s jaw with a smack, pain shooting up the length of his arm at the impact. His other wrist is grabbed immediately, but Levi continues to hit at the leader’s face and throat, while kicking at his legs to avoid being caught or picked up too easily. He can hear Hanji screaming, and then she flings herself at the guy directly behind the leader, her nails digging into the flesh of his neck.

The third one makes to jump on Levi’s back as he clings to the leader’s face, throwing punch after punch, but Levi wiggles his elbow free and jabs it into the guy’s ribs, making him keel over against the pavement.

The leader’s nose is bleeding, Levi notices after what must be seconds but feels like minutes, and his knuckles are covered in red. Hanji has left scratches all over the second guy’s face and neck, small tendrils of blood running down into his shirt. He’s struggling to get Hanji off him and there’s what looks like a tuft of her ripped out hair in his left hand.

Levi let’s the leader’s face go with one last slap and turn to shout at Hanji to run, but she’s already seen what he’s doing. She hurries over to Nanaba, who still looks frozen in place, grabs her arm and tells her to run. Then they’re off.

They sprint another two blocks and down the stairs of the underground station, jump over the turnstiles and run down the last set of stairs to the trains. There’s one on the platform already and the doors swing shut behind them the second they’re through.

Hanji’s legs are shaking when she takes a seat and guides Nanaba to sit next to her, arm around the blonde’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry I didn’t do anything,” Nanaba says, voice small. “I just got so thrown off by it, I thought-“

“Shh. It’s okay,” Hanji says. “We took care of it, didn’t we? Those motherfuckers. God, I hate them.”

Nanaba breathes. “Thank you. Both,” she says, glancing up to Levi, who’s still standing, hand grabbing one of the loops hanging form the ceiling.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says, “I’d beat them up again a thousand times if I had to. Assholes.”

The doors swing open again after a few minutes and it dawns on them at the same time that they took the train in the wrong direction.

Nanaba seems to cheer up a little after a while, and she promises that she’ll tell Mike about what happened at Hanji’s insistence that he needs to know.

They grab coffee on their way back to Camden and Levi spares a selfish thought for his record, now nothing more than shattered black plastic on the pavement.

-

They celebrate Christmas together, none of them having any family to speak of outside each other.

With extra spiked eggnog, Chinese food in cardboard boxes and nothing even closely resembling a tree, they curl up under blankets in Hanji’s freezing apartment while she blasts one of Sinatra’s Christmas records. They’d agreed not to buy each other any gifts and they’d all broken their promises, as best friends seem to do.

From Erwin, Mike and Nanaba Levi receives a pair of black platform Docs which the three of them had put together money for. He’s not sure whether it’s meant to be a jab at his height or not, but he loves them all the same. From Hanji he receives _Closer_ , and Levi just barely avoids getting choked up by launching at the record player and exchanging the droning Sinatra for new and sparkling Joy Division.

They stumble out the front door and into the falling snow somewhere after midnight, laughing and screaming at the dark sky as they make their wobbly way down the streets of London. Mike falls on his back in the middle of the road and promptly starts making a snow angel, with the added spike of his Mohawk at the top of his head. Hanji finds this hysterical and then it’s her turn to fall over from laughing too hard. 

“I feel alive,” Levi whispers towards the black sky and somewhere behind the falling snow, there’s a hint of stars.

-

It’s technically New Year’s Day when he’s grabbed by the collar and kissed square on the lips, but it still feels like 1980. Nanaba and Mike are out on the dance floor and Erwin is chatting up some guy with blue hair and eyebrow piercings at the bar.

It’s not the same club as last year, but it’s equally as gross and sticky. Levi’s sweating despite being in just an old band tee with cut of sleeves and jeans. Hanji is too, tendrils running down her face and neck and into the V-lining of her shirt.

“Not too bad, for a first kiss,” she says. “Let’s try it again.”

“That wasn’t our first, weirdo,” Levi tells her, half-shouting over the heavy bass of the music. “The first one was a year ago."

“That doesn’t count,” Hanji yells back. “I was drunk!”

“You’re drunk now,” he shoots back and she rolls her eyes.

“Just come here,” she says, and he does.

**Author's Note:**

> title is of course from the song london calling by the clash, which was released in 1980, same year as the fic took place hooray
> 
> feedback is always appreciated, as well as pointing out if i've done any terrible mistakes with the time period or something like that


End file.
